


A Sensible World

by Mithrigil



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Magic, F/M, Look At Your Life Look At Your Choices, M/M, Pragmatic Idealism, Royalty, Start Of Darkness, The Long Game, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 04:31:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17912066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: Pragmatism is a choice. Furthermore, it is a form of idealism; specifically, the ideal that sensibility will win out.





	A Sensible World

* *

Whenever the pages fight, Viren does his mother proud. He’s won, once or twice; he knows all his steps; he’s steadily fast and he can keep up with some of the bigger children (though not all of them, and certainly not either of the princesses or the prince); he’s showing signs of being tall and strong, like his parents, with powerful legs and lungs. All in all, he could be a more than adequate crownsguard when he grows up. It is a dream all his friends share and his position there can be assured, with only a little more time. And he loves it, loves the thrill of measuring himself against his peers, loves the way they look up at him when he knocks them down, loves playing little tricks, loves winning, when he wins, and figuring out how to win when he doesn’t.

However, his grandmother is even prouder when she hears the reports from Viren’s teachers. He has no especial love for math or history, but he memorizes well enough, he thinks. But his teachers have glowing things to say about his problem-solving, the questions that he asks them, his composition, his _comprehension_. They say he has a knack for symbols. They say he asks _why not_ as often as _why_.

One, in particular, says he should learn magic. So does his grandmother.

The first time he sees a spell cast, he finds it disgusting. He finds it brutal. It looks like war on something that’s already dead, like turning a creature into parts, dried eyes and stretched sinews and dark blood each to their own jar. His teacher takes a pinch here, a drop there, a hunk of dusty flesh and poof, there’s nothing, and it all feels like a joke.

And then it _works,_ and the rest doesn’t even matter.

There is a spirit, a hawk, on his teacher’s wrist. Viren can see it and see right through it at the same time. And he gets it, immediately: the blood came from a shifter-lizard and it was cold and slick and invisible, like all lizard blood is invisible because they’re the same temperature as wherever they stand; the sinews weren’t sinews anymore, they were thread, like hunting jesses; the flesh was from a hawk, of course, but his teacher could have used any animal to give it shape, and he’s not sure whose the eyes were and he asks his teacher, _now, please, I need to know._

The very next day, he stops going to the page fights.

 _More important to focus on the thing that only you can do,_ he thinks, _than to become exceptional at an unremarkable, fungible skill._ The Future Ruler of Katolis, whoever they are, will need more than a shield or a sword; they’ll need a _knife_ , to cut straight to the heart of their problems and show them what’s inside.

Viren can be that.

*  *

Prince Harrow loves the outdoors.

Prince Harrow loves the snow.

Prince Harrow loves playing in the snow, outdoors.

Prince Harrow is _insane_.

Nevertheless, here Viren is, bundled up to the point where even if his fingers went numb he wouldn’t be able to feel them anyway, while Prince Harrow, one of his elder sisters, and the younger members of the crownsguard draw battle lines for a snow war. Princess Keana gets first pick, the Prince second, and Viren finds himself one of the first selected for the Prince’s team. They flip a coin to see who is offense, and who defense: Princess Keana wins and calls defense, and takes off laughing with her team to begin fortifying Banther Lodge.

One of the crownsguard groans. “Great, they have the easy job.”

“Which means we have the fun one,” Viren says. “Haven’t you ever wanted to be the dragon, breaking the siege?”

Pretty much all of the crownsguard on the team looks at Viren as if he, not Harrow, is the crazy one: Harrow asks, “You have some ideas, Viren?”

“Yes, your Highness—I do. I wasn’t kidding about the dragon.”

“You mean magic,” Harrow says, his mouth quirking by the strap of his winter hat.

“Magic wouldn’t be sporting,” the spoilsport from earlier says, with a plain sneer. “It’s cheating.”

Viren sighs. “Do you want to win or don’t you?”

The spoilsport gapes; when he, and some of the others, look to Harrow, Harrow takes a minute and thinks before answering. “I want to win, but I don’t want to ruin the game.”

“I can work with that,” Viren says, nodding. And it speaks highly of the Prince, that he’s keeping the longer game in mind. He cares about his sister, and everyone else playing. He may be third in line to the throne, but he’d probably be a good king if he got the chance.

Viren beckons to the others to kneel, and starts drawing a battle plan in the snow. “Strike Team here, among the trees; archers and quartermasters here and here. Leandros, do you think you can rig up a snow ballista like the water cannon you hit me with last summer?”

“Maybe?”

“Even if you have to fake it, I want you to make it look like you’ve got something big and draw their fire. I’ll be over here,” he points to his rough sketch of the frozen riverbank, “and I promise, your Highness, I won’t create anything that will actually fire on the lodge. Just some chaos, so you can sweep in and take advantage.”

Prince Harrow laughs, and the cuffs on his braids clink against each other. “You promise? You won’t steal my thunder?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, your Highness,” Viren says, and maybe it feels a little heavy with honesty. He wishes, earnestly, that he wasn’t marked to serve whoever became king, and could just work with Prince Harrow instead. “I assume you’re on the strike team?”

“You know, my father says something hilarious about _assumptions_...”

Viren cracks him a smile. “I’m still right.”

Prince Harrow reaches over and claps Viren on the shoulder. There are so many layers of cloth, gloves and sweaters and cloaks and coats and scarves, but something warm thrills through Viren all the same.

“Make it happen, Viren,” Prince Harrow says. Then, leaving Viren a little, frankly, dumbstruck, he calls the rest of the strike team to arms by name and skirts into the woods to start making ammunition.

An hour later, right at the peak of the battle, Viren fights through the cold and summons the most magnificent snow dragon illusion anyone here has ever seen. Glittering and terrible, with a crown of icicles and hot sublimating eyes, it gusts past the Lodge and circles overhead, and the Princess’s team runs screaming.

Across the battlefield, Prince Harrow’s eyes meet Viren’s. There’s a flash of fear in them—there always is—but the thrill of his smile washes it all away, and he doesn’t turn down his gaze no matter the darkness he sees.

Well, their team does, technically, win the fight. But the crownsguard sounds the _actual_ alarm thinking there’s an elven enemy, and Viren and Harrow both get the dressing down of their young lives from the Captain.

It’s worth it.

*     *

If Viren hadn’t already seen that spell-wrecked face reflected back at him once before, he’d retch. It has his shape. It has a semblance of his color, underneath the cracked-parchment flaking and black inky pools that have flooded his eye-sockets. It has his hair, though it’s shooting through white, white of all things, he’s not even twenty, he shouldn’t be grey.

But Harrow was poisoned, and Katolis needs an heir. It is that simple.

So Viren is back to his books. The purgative spell took—well, it took a lot. Catching a banther was hard enough, even an adolescent, and even with eel-chains; carving into the banther for its kidneys while its heart still beat was grisly and distasteful; and bearing the organs back to Harrow’s bedside before the banther could expire took the last of Viren’s white hare tendons.

To say nothing of casting the purgative spell itself: it tore out part of Viren’s soul. The cool, clean sweat on Harrow’s brow was completely worth it—until the palace doctor took one look at Viren and dropped her tray in horror at what she saw.

No matter. There’s a spell that will fix him. Just like there was a spell to fix Harrow.

There—there, on the pages before him, dusted with dried banther blood at the corners from his frantic search—there. _The sacrifice of the ephemeral to preserve that which decays._ The life of a rare precious insect, to extend his own. Perfect. Simple. Already laid out in steps and incantations, right in front of him.

He could send someone else to find the butterflies. They’re easy enough to describe, and he shouldn’t leave Harrow. They congregate where violetastrals grow, and they do breed in captivity as long as their favorite flowers are caged with them. Sending a tracker with a delicate touch out to uproot a violetastral bush and catch a few moths would spare Viren the inquiries into his health, the whispers of the inherent corruption of dark magic, the potential future obstruction of his arts and his service to the prince, to the future king, to the land they share and its people and its life—

No. That hypothetical tracker might develop curiosity, and it’s not the hardest spell in the book to find. Vanity and magery go hand-in-hand, and—Viren looks down at his hands, dark raised veins in stretched translucent skin, and the right is shaking like a leaf clinging stubbornly to a branch—even when it is not vanity it is _preservation_.

Grey before his time, he will accept. Dead before his time, he will not. There is too much to do. And he will do it himself.

He takes his cloak, and his book, and steals into the night.

*     *

“You don’t have to marry her, you know,” Viren says, and no matter the _you know_ he tacks on at the end it can’t erase the inherent condescension, and he regrets it as soon as he says it and only blames the alcohol _in part_.

Harrow laughs, because of course he does, and leans in over his near-empty glass, elbows propped on the table, chin propped on his knuckles. “You’re already spoken for,” he says, grinning in that damned insufferable way of his that Viren won’t call out, ever.

Harrow could be serious. It wouldn’t matter. Besides, it’s true, Viren _is_ spoken for, because some things are more important than finding yet another way to be indispensable to Harrow, like being married to someone who will give him children before his magic catches up with him, not that Harrow needs to know that last part. The criteria are fulfilled, and his children are exquisite, and the rest doesn’t matter. Harrow is making the same choice, after all: Princess Sarai is lovely, and an excellent warrior, and already comes bundled with a spare son in case Harrow doesn’t get a child on her. It’s an excellent choice. It’s a _correct_ choice. Viren will not fault his Prince, his friend, for making such a correct choice.

He will, however, stare into Harrow’s bright oak-wine eyes and metaphorically kick himself repeatedly for not saying something when they were younger. Or for letting his guard down too late.

Damn this alcohol. 

Harrow must have seen something, because his eyebrows crease, shifting his crown, and he straightens his neck enough that the candlelight fills his pupils. Another reminder of all the things Viren is not, and yet, he cannot look away. “Viren,” Harrow says, and it’s beautiful, “after Sarai and I are a little more...established,” he says, and the innuendo is obvious this time, if clumsy and almost diffident, “we can talk. The four of us. Or just the three of us, if your wife isn’t interested.”

There is a world, in that admission. There is a world in that admission that Viren can look at through glass. Harrow is already speaking for Sarai; this means they have already discussed the possibility, or something like it. Which means Harrow and Sarai have already been together, which is good, but that also means Viren is picturing it, the two of them warm and writhing together on Harrow’s bed, and lying together conspiring in the aftermath like the young lovers they are. They are adventuresome and bright and they’re thinking of Katolis first: but they’re not _only_ thinking of Katolis, if they can think of letting him in. They think of letting him in: they don’t think of having him in their bed as a matter of _Katolis_ , which, by the primal gods, they cannot know how much Viren wants to hear that, to feel that, to feel what that is even _like_.

They’ve talked about four, about sharing, about inviting Viren and his wife or even Viren alone into that bed: which means they have an image of him, an expectation, and he highly doubts that it’s an expectation that he can meet.

His wife says that he has gone cold. He’s not sure if it’s literal, figurative, or a self-fulfilling apprehension, but the end result is the same.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Viren lies, because it is the sensible thing to do.

*         *

The land is revitalized. The same cannot be said of Viren.

History will remember a grand, public spellcasting, but Viren is not history, and he will remember excruciating pain. He will remember being the conduit for fire, the endless sensation of burning alive but not dying, not crumbling, not quite. He’ll remember his wife throwing a cloak over his suddenly-chilled shoulders and embracing him to lead him from the circle so that no one asked any questions, and he’ll remember pulling it as low as he can over his face so that the people of Katolis and Duren can remember only the glowing fields, unblighted, not the fourth sacrifice that had to be made to save them. Let them remember the three Queens, and King Harrow crying with quiet dignity, and closure. Let them believe it was enough. Let them believe it was bright.

She takes him straight to the painting that leads to his workshop, pries it open, shuts it behind her, and guides him down the stairs. He thinks, perversely, that this is the most his wife has touched him in years, and it’s still through a cloak. They spiral down the stairs, not quite in step, and she knows exactly where to take him.

The rage of the titan, the righteous indignation, will take more than magic to scour from his soul. The crackle of Thunder on its heels can mean only war. War, with one of the five kingdoms without leadership, with _his_ kingdom in mourning, and with fertile fields and full coffers but only the ephemeral morale of sacrifice.

He sits among the butterflies, shivering. Flitting in the stony darkness, they illuminate the void that his face has become. It takes him an hour at least to choose one to crush. His hands are still shaking, still cold, even when the mirror reflects something approaching hale. He aches all over, his head and his knees especially. The spell isn’t supposed to be an illusion, it’s supposed to heal and preserve and purge him. It’s not working.

Or it’s working, but not enough.

When he can, he makes his way up the stairs. His heart pounds, still. His joints creak and scrape. He presses himself against the secret door back into his room, their room, and there his wife is, looking at him with more resignation than the horror he expected.

“We need to talk,” his wife says.

She has already had her section of the armoire emptied.

It seems certain elements of this discussion don’t require his input, but there is no point in bringing it up. There is no point in dwelling, if she’s already decided. It’s safe, it’s fair, and Viren has other things to fight for and not enough time to do it.

“We do,” he agrees, clicking the painting shut behind him. “I want our children.”

*                 *

“Amaya is unattached,” Harrow suggests, completely serious but for the cant of his shrugging shoulder.

Viren laughs in his face for a solid minute.

*                           *

“We should betroth them,” Viren says, and this time he’s not blaming the alcohol at all. He isn’t drinking any, no matter how it dulls the pain in his joints. It’s fleeting. Health is fleeting, and the illusion of health is more fleeting still. So he paces, to work through the pain instead of letting it fester and grow.

Harrow sighs. “We don’t need to talk about this now.”

“I think we do,” Viren insists, and if the words come out too terse, Harrow can read the best into them, like he almost always does. “Not Ezran, Ezran you can wait on. But Callum—he likes Soren well enough, and he thinks Claudia hung the stars. Why not make it official?”

“His heart could change,” Harrow points out with yet another sigh. There have been too many of those, since the war. “Just let Callum be free.”

“I’m not saying you should choose _for_ him, just...give him the options,” Viren decides.

“And have you given Soren and Claudia those options?”

“Ezran’s still too young,” Viren points out. “Unless you mean they’re deciding which one of them wants make the effort for Callum. My money’s on Soren. You have to admit, they’d make a good team.”

“You know what I mean, Viren.”

Viren looks over his shoulder at the end of his row. Harrow has, in fact, gotten his first grey hairs, if the sheen at his temples beneath the ruddy crown is any indication. Viren chokes back the pang of envy, teeth set against any selfish admission.

Even Viren’s legacy and security are of less consequence than the needs of his King, except where they overlap with the needs of Katolis.

Harrow is right; Katolis doesn’t need a betrothal yet, not while it’s still smarting from war and loss. _Harrow_ doesn’t need a betrothal yet, for the same reasons.

But Callum is not free. No Prince is free.

“We’ll table it,” Viren concedes. And he’ll tell Soren and Claudia to make sure that they pay Callum especial mind.

*                                        *

Viren decides: the only fundamental difference between giving his body to Harrow literally, and what he’s been doing for years, is the literalness therein.

Harrow will know, because he will inhabit it. He will feel the strain, the craft cobbled together by the art he’s come to despise. But he will _feel_ it, because he will be alive, and that, that is more important than Viren taking his secrets to the grave.

He watches the butterflies and the violetastrals glow. He will not miss them.

*                                                        *

Desperation is such an ugly word. It implies that there is no sensible option. _There is always a sensible option._ There has to be. The world is built on principles of cause and effect and circumstance is a tempering fire, an environmental concern. All it takes is knowing the rules to create the exploits that prove the rules, and the rules, while not _fixed_ exactly, are consistent enough that even the exploits are in accord with game.

He yanks the curtain off the mirror, the portal into the Startouch Elf’s world.

Viren has never hated elves, exactly. Resented, of course—they are the enemy, after all, and their magic doesn’t erode them into early graves—but the enemy could as easily be human. The blind, stubborn boors of the council upstairs are proof enough of that. The self-serving ingrate Kings and Queen and that child of Duren pretending to speak for her people may well become enemies, not just obstacles. And this Startouch Elf, this wizard, is beautiful in his alien way, skin glittering with secrets, ageless and androgynous and all the colors of Viren’s own corruption but assembled into lines that _follow,_ that flow gracefully into each other like the drape of his robes, like the practical arrangement of paraphernalia on the table before him. He may be jealous. He’s self-aware enough to acknowledge that.

Viren doesn’t trust him, of course. He doesn’t know enough to trust him, and even if he did he wouldn’t. And whether he trusts him or not, he is not desperate. It is simply the swiftest, cleanest, calculated path available.

There is inquiry in the Startouch Elf’s reflection. It is an expression Viren knows intimately.

The rules may not be known by all the players. Viren himself has played the game, not knowing all the rules. But the rules are there. They have to be. There are gods and primal forces and they _must make sense_.

He raises the dagger to his palm.

* *


End file.
